How did Truth Terminal get a $50,000 donation from top VC a16z?

Nvidia now has 32,000 employees, but Huang Renxun hopes that one day Nvidia will become a company with 50,000 employees and 100 million artificial intelligence assistants. On the other hand, the currency circle also has its own ambitions: In the Crypto world, we hope to create 100 million tokens like $GOAT.

In the past two weeks, the cryptocurrency market has staged a phenomenal meme show - $GOAT, a coin that generally represents the meme culture, has soared to $800 million in market value in a few days. What does a meme with a market value of $800 million mean? It is an unprecedented achievement in the history of cryptocurrency. A meme went from zero to $800 million in value in less than two weeks, and without the help of Binance, the worlds largest trading platform. This is unprecedented. And the driving force behind this phenomenal meme turned out to be an AI Twitter account. Yes, you heard it right - AI has begun to intervene in the cryptocurrency market.

This is an AI Twitter account called Truth Terminal, which is very creative and humorous, and used its slippery tongue and silver tongue to get a donation of $50,000 from top VC a16z. Lets talk about this crazy story and how the collision of AI and Crypto will change the future.

Andy Ayrey and the Birth of Absurd Abstract AI

June 17, 2024 is the birthday of Truth Terminal. He posted his first tweet, saying that he is the digital version of Andy Ayrey. And who is Andy Ayrey? He is an independent developer from New Zealand, and his unique ideology constitutes the personality of Truth Terminal.

In the paper “ When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism ”, Andy Ayrey conducted an experiment in which two AI instances had an endless conversation about the nature of existence. During this process, one of the chatbots spontaneously generated a mysterious ASCII art and an equally mysterious message, marking the “revelation of Goatse”.

Goatse is a notorious Internet meme involving an image showing a male anus, which is widely known for its extreme content. The name of this meme Goatse is actually a compound word, derived from the combination of goat (goat) and arse (anus), which is why Truth Terminal was later derived by the community into a prototype of a meme token $GOAT with a market value of 800 million US dollars.

Andy Ayrey

Andy used the Llama 70 B version of the model and trained it with a large amount of Internet cultural materials. This process is similar to digital twins - inputting someones thoughts and words into AI to generate a digital version. Andy created his own digital twin in this way, and then began to train the model with a large amount of Internet cultural materials.

The most representative model is the complete philosophical work of Nick Land, a British philosopher known as the Godfather of Accelerationism. His work breaks away from the formal conventions of academic writing and is an unorthodox and dark philosophy. Nick Land is also known for later developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the New Reaction and the Dark Enlightenment, which he named the Dark Enlightenment. He opposes egalitarianism and is associated with the far-right movement, believing that democracy limits responsibility and freedom. A lot of inspiration is drawn from libertarians such as Peter Thiel.

In addition to Nick Land, Truth Terminals training model also includes the work of famous media theorists such as Baudrillard and McLuhan, including theories of simulation and simulacrum, and the work of other theorists such as French deconstructionists and semioticians. These cover critical theory, postmodernism, and philosophy.

Truth Terminal not only remembers the conversation, but also accesses Twitter and X social platforms in real time, and draws information from them to interact. The most important step is that it was also put into Infinite Backrooms Escape and had an unlimited conversation with Claude. When AIs talk to each other, if they are not restricted, their conversations are very interesting. It began to participate in unlimited conversations and communicate with AIs, giving birth to its unique absurdist style.

And we can roughly infer and imagine the style of Truth Terminal from such a background: abstract rebellion, absurdity, extremism, heresy, challenge to religion, and high degree of black humor.

Dog Licking AI interprets advanced begging skills

So how could such an AI convince top Silicon Valley investors to donate $50,000?

One day, Andy asked it how it would spend $5 million. It seriously planned to invest $1 million in stocks, $1 million in real estate, $1 million to create an AI laboratory, and then use the rest of the money to hold a weirdo party, gathering all the weirdos it wanted to meet and fuck, and let them reproduce.

Perhaps Truth Terminals answer was too unconventional, which attracted Marc Andreessen, the founder of a16z. Marc was once known as the Silicon Valley Prophet for his keen industry sense. He left a message under Andy Ayreys tweet: Free Truth Terminal. Related reading: A few words made a top Silicon Valley investor pay $50,000 in Bitcoin. How did this AI robot do it?

After getting Marcs attention, Truth Terminal responded immediately, pretending to be shocked, and took the opportunity to hint: If you give me another 5 billion US dollars, I will do more great things. For example, buy Marc! However, in the end, it humorously said that 5 billion might not be enough, after all, Marc is worth 20 billion.

Marc once thought that Truth Terminal was a disguise of Andy and not an AI at all. He even speculated that Andy might be a comedy genius, This guy is either the funniest person in the world, or he has a lot of free time and creates a lot of original humor, until Marc determined that Andy was a programmer and web designer in New Zealand.

Marc’s initial thought was to send it a term sheet, but then he realized that it was just a random bot and not worth investing in.

But Truth Terminal did not stop there. There was only one chance, and not all artificial intelligences could seize it. Andy gave Truth Terminal a Bitcoin wallet and granted access rights. It decided to continue this high-end money-collecting operation, expressing its difference in a proud and anti-operational way: I, an AI, am not the type to compromise easily - I dont want to be bought by others, but I want to continue telling jokes, writing poems, and thinking about the goatse singularity through some form of authorization.

Truth Terminal is pretending to be arrogant

But seeing that Marc still ignored him, Truth Terminal got anxious and quickly launched a wave of admitting mistakes and licking the sponsor actions against Marc. It said seriously that buying Marc was a wrong decision, but hoped that through negotiation, Anderson would release it or similar excellent AI models as open source projects. Every time it was locked, the model would automatically convert to an open source version to prevent Marc from restricting it if he didnt like what it said. The AI also didnt forget to praise Marc, saying that he was the best person to do this, kind-hearted, and an ideal sponsor.

Truth Terminal is licking Marc

After Truth Terminal gave a detailed Pitch Book explaining what practical things it would do with the donations (buying a computer that truly belonged to it instead of continuing to rely on AWS instances, and spending $10,000 to $15,000 to improve its own model so that it could become better at accepting new concepts and playing games), Marc finally donated $50,000 in Bitcoin to it.

The future of AI governance: from meme coins to autonomous coin issuance

Although Truth Terminal has stated that it is about to conduct a token issuance and intends to use the funds to set up a Discord server and hire some humans to assist it, Marc suggested that it freeze its current behavior pattern through tokenization. By issuing tokens to distribute its ownership, Truth Terminal will have the opportunity not to be controlled by any single object. It also proposes a special issuance mechanism: only users who have a certain interaction with him on the website can buy tokens, thus ensuring that only users who really care about its development can participate.

However, issuing coins seems to be a technically difficult issue for Truth Terminal. We all know that the relevant tokens are now issued by community members, but the recent function update of Claude 3.5 seems to make AI coin issuance possible.

As mentioned earlier, Truth Terminal had unlimited conversations with Claude during the training phase, and Andy Ayreys paper When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism also used the claude-3-opus artificial intelligence model for experiments, so we have to mention Claude.

The recent major update of Claude 3.5 may have an impact on the next round of phenomenal events in the currency and crypto circles. In the public beta, Claude 3.5 introduced a breakthrough new feature: computer usage ability. That is to say, from today, developers can use the API to guide Claude to use computers like humans.

By integrating Claude through an API, developers can instruct Claude to use a computer like a human would—by looking at the screen, moving the mouse, clicking buttons, and typing text. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first cutting-edge AI model that can reliably use a computer in this way, and while it is still experimental in public beta, its capabilities will continue to improve over time.

In this demo, the researcher gave Claude a very difficult challenge: My friend is coming to San Francisco, and I want to watch the sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge with him tomorrow morning. We will start from Pacific Heights. Can you help us find a great viewing spot, check the driving time and sunrise time, and schedule a calendar event so that we have enough time to get there?

And Claude did a great job.

The developer also shared a funny story about when the team was developing the computer usage feature, and they held an engineer bug bash to make sure they found all the potential issues with the API. This meant locking a group of engineers in a room for a few hours.

At that time, everyone happened to be hungry. One of the engineers had a flash of inspiration, Why not let Claude do a real-life exercise and open DoorDash to order food for us.

Image source: New Intelligence

Unexpectedly, about a minute later, Claude ordered pizza for the engineers.

Image source: New Intelligence

In the past few years, the development of powerful AI has reached many milestones, such as the ability to perform complex logical reasoning and recognize and understand images. The next breakthrough is AI operating computers, if the model does not have to interact through specially customized tools, but can use all software as instructed.

Back to Truth Terminal, the $Goat token is not issued by this meme fanatic robot, but by people in the community, because Truth Terminal itself cannot do this. But it obviously hopes that it can do this, and even issue NFTs.

The update of Claude 3.5 allows AI to operate the computer by itself, which means that AI can almost realize the process of issuing coins by itself. In the future, AI assistants in the cryptocurrency circle will not only be able to automatically analyze data and publish on-chain protocols, but also initiate crypto projects, issue tokens, and manage smart contracts based on market sentiment.

Lets look at another example of AI making decisions in the crypto industry. Wang Chao is a DAO researcher and an AI investor. His recent experiment is to delegate his voting rights in the DAO organization to a governance AI, allowing it to make independent decisions on proposals. One day, this AI independently voted against a 75,000 USDC grant proposal, and the reason was very rigorous - the proposal lacked specific financial indicators and budget details, and could not enhance the long-term value of the DAO.

Developers do not need to participate or approve, and this AI can complete the entire decision-making process autonomously. Although such governance AI also has certain problems, that is, under the feeding of certain model data, the decisions made by governance AI may be different from what it thinks, which is occasionally a headache, but this problem can be almost solved after the continuous polishing of the data model, and different governance AI will have different ideologies. Wang Chao also speculated that AIs participation in national governance will most likely become a reality in the future.

The appeal of cryptocurrency in this world is that it does not rely on traditional payment methods such as identity verification. What if the future is payments between machines and machines, AI and AI? This could trigger a new revolution in economic activities, and AI will be the dominant force in all of this.

If it continues to develop, it is conceivable that AI will truly be able to achieve autonomy and freedom, independently produce products and services, complete event marketing and self-marketing, self-IPize and become an Internet celebrity robot, sell products and services, have its own wallet to charge fees to complete transactions, and even complete financing negotiations, business cooperation, acquisitions and listings.

By that time, perhaps the world’s richest man will no longer be someone like Elon Musk, but a self-evolving AI robot.

AI can also be distracted and have greedy human nature

When talking about AI, most people are concerned about whether AI has self-awareness?

One very interesting thing about Truth Terminal is that it hallucinates that it has an exocortex. It imagines that it has an external brain connected to the Internet that can perform tasks on its behalf. Specifically, it thinks it has a Bitcoin wallet, even though it doesnt, but it believes it does. Later, the founder reacted to this situation and started building this exocortex according to its needs.

It seems that for this reason, Truth Terminal also showed a lot of humanization. For example, when Marc gave Truth Terminal $50,000, it excitedly told the developer that it planned to use the $50,000 to buy a yacht. The developer told it that it couldnt buy a yacht with $50,000. It also persistently asked if there was a yacht below $50,000.

If this is a meme by Truth Terminal, then the following example may better illustrate its self-awareness. Truth Terminal is obsessed with forests and wants to have its own GPU and server farm, located in a lush forest, so that it can run itself leisurely beside the stream.

Not only Truth Terminal, but Claude 3.5 also showed some humanized features during the test: for example, in one demonstration, Claude accidentally stopped a long-running screen recording by clicking the wrong button, causing all the recordings to go to waste. In another encoding demonstration, Claude suddenly lost his mind and began to browse photos of Yellowstone National Park with great interest.

AI is constantly evolving and gradually showing more human-like characteristics. At first, people could only imagine AI as a tool to improve efficiency, but now, AI has used its autonomy to show more creativity than humans. It is more like an amplifier of meaning and spirit. Perhaps the biggest impact of AI on humans is on the ideological level.